I am a developer and I most often use Sqlserver. The most common tool for working with Sqlserver is Sqlserver management studio and it does it’s job; which happens to be everything. Why not create a (relational) database tool targeted towards developers?

Things I normally don’t do

Now, as a developer I normally touch security at the beginning or end of a project. I usual handle just one of a couple of databases (database in sqlserver lingua, I believe it is called schema in Oracle) at a time. Space allocation is only used when doing backup and restore to create new or roll back a database. I have, unfortunately, never touched anything like sharding, replication, availability or other beardy stuff.

Things I normally do

I write queries, lots of queries. Depending on project I write stored procedures and triggers. I have also dealt with having DLLs inside Sqlserver. I do a lot of comparing schema and data with other databases.

What I want

I have a need for an IDE that leaves out all stuff I don’t or seldom use; whenever I need to dabble with security I can fire up Sqlserver management studio.

awesome intelligence/typeahead/whateveryoucallit in the query editor. Management studios intellisense has become better but I still lack functionality I get with Sqlprompt by Redgate. There are semi graphical tools for aiding query writing but I haven’t taken a serious stab at using them; I should.

relations should be visible. When I work with a table I’d like to have indices, triggers and stored procedures in close vicinity, not through an “object explorer” tool window and a deep drill down tree. Say you are writing “select * from User” or selecting the User table in a list somewhere. Why not have a window, toolbar or menu automatically populate with depending tables, triggers and stored procedures?

drill down possibility. Way to often I write a query and another and another just to find out where data comes from or vice verse. Without spending any time thinking and designing I am visualizing that when a row, say of a User, is found, one can with a click or key stroke get all Roles related to said User through the UserRoles table. Another example is User-> Order-> OrderItem-> Currency-> Country-> Company-> User.

copy/paste update of table data. I also would like conversion of such copy or paste to a query to run on another instance.

What I want stuff that is really nice-to-have

global search. I sometimes find a guid or a part of a string that has fled its sanctuary and need to find where in the database it originates. Somewhere I have a stored procedure for this but I’d like to have it built in to the tool and with more intelligence like searching for guids in proper fields and asking before doing a free text search in a million rows table.

fast backup and restore. To take a temporary backup before doing a big or dangerous change. Then to restore said backup with ease. The Management studio dialogue for this is big, hard to use and error prone. By and by I need to create a copy of a database, say for branching a project, and that can too be made to be done with ease.

no install. I manipulate data in production and don’t want to have to install anything; an xcopy should be enough.

Investigating the event log in Windows is fiddly to say the least. The list takes a lot of space but doesn’t show much. It takes a while to load in Windows 7. The contents of each event can only be seen after opening the event and only one at a time in WinXP and with too much wasted space in Win7.

If one exported the event log to a queryable database, an ISAM would suffice, it would be a breeze to search and list. It shouldn’t be too hard to write such a program. Either export when a button is pressed or set it to subscribe to event log events.